Real 8bit Color Map Like the Msx2

For  a few weeks now we’re busy at school with VHDL and FPGA’s. This is some really awesome stuff and we just build our own VGA signal with an framebuffer. The only downside of this is, that wat we had coded from the examples was only 3bit RGB, so one bit for Red, one bit for Green and one bit for Blue. Since the VGA connector on our board (Nexsys 2) is able to show 8bit RGB. I created a 3bit to 8bit RGB converter, but as you may guess this won’t give you extra colors, but only a stronger signal.

Instead of setting one of the three red signals to one, the converter puts them all to one. So to make things better, I created a new framebuffer that can display real 8bit RGB values. So three values for Red, three for green and two for blue. Now to build this was pretty easy, but the hard part was to find a nice real 8bit colormap, so I can see the values for each color. I was unable to find a good one, most 8bit turns out to be a 24bit RGB (8bit for each color) or to be an indexed scheme.

So I build a small C# program that creates a 8bit color map. Below you find the result and even the source, but don’t shoot me on the code :-)

Sourcecode ColorMapper - Sorry, lost during migration.